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Why You Should Automate Your eBay Tasks

The ultimate goal of every eBay trader is to grow their business by operating as many auctions as possible. But how you think about the overhead involved in managing multiple auctions? How can you maintain good relationship with your customer and be alerted when somebody posted a negative feedback? The answer is automation.

Always automate if you want to grow your eBay business. There is no way you can compete with other eBay trader if you don’t automate. Automation brings your productivity up; it’s as simple as that. Of course common sense should prevail here. If you are dealing only with small number of items, you wouldn’t need to automate. But when you are dealing with huge volumes things could very easily get out of hand.

The good news is, it’s in eBay’s interest to make the life of eBay traders easier. EBay has put a lot of effort into making their site easy to use and to provide various auction management tools. The bad news is some people are completely unaware of these tools. They keep doing things manually, and they are wondering why they can’t complete with other traders. Here are some of the tools that eBay has developed to help traders design and maintain their auctions quickly and effectively (all these tools can be found on eBay website, just google if you can’t find them).

Turbo Lister

This free tool is a must-have if you want to be serious eBay trader. This is a desktop application (desktop application is an application that runs locally on your computer, just like Microsoft Word, so you don’t have to use your browser to access it) that will help you design and configure your listings. It also includes a user-friendly editor so you can see how your listing will look like as you design it. It will also submit your listings for you when you are ready, very handy.

Selling Manager

An online tool to complement Turbo Lister. Its key feature is bulk feedback and invoice generator.

eBay Toolbar

This is a free browser toolbar, similar to Google or Yahoo toolbar. It provides you quick access to your eBay listings and items you are buying. It’s basically what keeps you connected to your eBay activities.

You would also need to consider if you want to automate your customer service and follow-up sales. Things that can be automated are sending out "thank you" messages once they have purchased and following up to see how they are happy with their purchases. There are lots of email management solution and autoresponders available out there to help you manage your relationship with customers. Again use Google to find them.